It is with a procession of wounded men that Mathieu Gérault’s first feature film confronts us, narrating the impossible return to civilian life of young French soldiers returned from a mission in Afghanistan.
Following an ambush in which his unit fell, soldier Christian Lafayette (Niels Schneider), repatriated to his suburban dormitory, tries to reintegrate despite the trauma and his alcohol problems. Of his comrades in arms, only Henri (Thomas Daloz), interned in a psychiatric hospital, and his childhood friend Mounir (Sofian Khammes), injured in the leg, remain.
What happened there does not want to let them go. Starting with the vague circumstances of the operation, kept secret by their commander, De Royer (Denis Lavant), known as “the Father”. But there is also the opium trade in which two of the three survivors were involved, and which they must now settle, by resuming service in crime.
Masculinity at half mast
Sentinelle Sud thus operates the junction between two types of well-identified narratives, more rarely joined together: on the one hand, post-traumatic war fiction, of which American cinema has showered us with examples, most often about Vietnam; on the other, the dark thriller, guided by these contemporary forms of fatality that are social determinants.
These two mythologies compose here the landscape of a masculinity at half mast, scattered, where the fathers are lacking, where the brothers go astray and where the sons, like Christian, wander alone, trying in vain to “be a family” at all costs. cost.
For what binds men together is also what tears them apart: a skein of insolvent debts, heavy legacies and stubborn guilt. This is precisely what Christian, an abandoned child in search of an impossible brotherhood, experiences. And it is not insignificant that the only woman to enter his dislocated universe is Lucie (India Hair), a psychiatrist who is expecting a child – that is to say a Madonna.
ball dense figures
The disillusionment of sons in the face of the silence of fathers: this is how Sentinel Sud could be summed up, which extends its subject to a French Republic very quick to abandon its “children”, in this case those who believe they find refuge under its flag.
From this dense ball of figures, patterns and contradictory affects, Mathieu Gérault uses skill to tie the different threads, a little less to untie them in a last hasty movement, which is accomplished at the cost of some improbable reversals. . As happens with some first films, this one goes more serious, at the cost of appearing to be, say, “good student”.
Its best argument lies in its impeccable trio of young actors: India Hair, Sofian Khammes and Niels Schneider, staggeringly mature, deeply fragile, admirably uncertain.